Seagate Demonstrates World’s Fastest SSD

Today Seagate Technology unveiled its production-ready unit of the fastest single solid-state drive (SSD) demonstrated to date, with throughput performance of 10 gigabytes per second (GB/s). Seagate states that its early unit meets Open Compute Project (OCP) specifications, making it ideal for hyperscale data centers looking to adopt the fastest flash technology with the latest and most sustainable standards.

With new innovations such as maximizing PCIe lanes and the NVMe protocol, latency is vanishing and performance and speed are driving up even higher. Drive vendors have been padding out their traditional flash product lines including Seagate who’s picking up the pace. Currently Seagate has the 1200.2 (via partnership with Micron) and its Nytro SSDs, the Nytro XF1440 2.5”, Nytro XM1440 M.2 NVMe SSD, and the Nytro XP6500 Flash Accelerator Card. In this case, instead of going after highly saturated markets, Seagate is offering a unique SSD that is more than 4GB/s faster than the previous fastest-industry SSD on the market. While clearly a niche product today, the new drive gives Seagate a chance to recast their brand as an innovator in flash-based storage.

The new 10GB/s technology will work with any system that supports the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) protocol. It also meets the OCP storage specifications being driven by Facebook, which will help reduce the power and cost burdens traditionally associated with operating at this level of performance. And the new SSD is aimed at businesses such as large-scale cloud providers and web applications, weather modeling, or statistical trends analysis.

The 10GB/s SSD accommodates 16-lane PCIe slots, Seagate is also announcing another SSD for eight-lane PCIe slots. This second SSD is aimed at organizations that want higher performance, 6.7GB/s, but are limited by power usage requirements or cost. Both of these units can be used in modern data center compute and storage architectures.

Availability

Both the 16 and eight-lane SSD units have been made available to Seagate customers and are expected for general availability in summer 2016. They will be on display at the upcoming Open Compute Project Summit 2016 in San Jose, Calif. March 9-10 at Seagate’s booth, #C12.